William Worthy, a Reporter Drawn to Forbidden Datelines

William Worthy, a foreign correspondent who in the thick of the Cold War ventured where the United States did not want him to go — including the Soviet Union, China, Cuba — and became the subject of both a landmark federal case concerning travel rights and a ballad by the protest singer Phil Ochs, died on May 4 in Brewster, Mass. He was 92.

His death, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, was announced on the website of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Mr. Worthy was a Nieman Foundation fellow in the 1956-57 academic year.

A correspondent for The Afro-American of Baltimore, a weekly newspaper, from 1953 to 1980, Mr. Worthy also contributed freelance reports to CBS News, The New York Post and other publications. He became an international cause célèbre in the early 1960s when, returning from Cuba, he was found guilty of violating United States immigration law.

The son of a distinguished obstetrician, William Worthy Jr. was born in Boston on July 7, 1921.

“Despite the respect and certain privileges derived from membership in a professional ‘black bourgeoisie’ family, my sisters and I were clearly aware, as children, of our ‘inferior’ minority group status,” Mr. Worthy wrote in a 1968 article for The Boston Globe. “ ‘The problem’ was discussed at the dinner table. More importantly, it was all around us.”

After graduating from the Boston Latin School, Mr. Worthy earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Bates College in Lewiston, Me., in 1942. In World War II, though an ulcer would have let him be classified 4-F, he chose to become a conscientious objector.

Mr. Worthy began his career as a press aide for the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph. During his years at The Afro-American, he kept one foot in the realm of direct advocacy, joining Freedom Riders on their pilgrimages through the South and later becoming a close ally of Malcolm X.

Gabriel García Márquez, Conjurer of Literary Magic

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

Cristóbal Pera, his former editor at Random House, confirmed the death. Mr. García Márquez learned he had lymphatic cancer in 1999, and a brother said in 2012 that he had developed senile dementia.

Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.

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Harvey Weinstein remembers García Marquez

No draft had more impact than the one for “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Mr. García Márquez’s editor began reading it at home one rainy day, and as he read page after page by this unknown Colombian author, his excitement grew. Soon he called the Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez and summoned him urgently to the home.

Mr. Eloy Martinez remembered entering the foyer with wet shoes and encountering pages strewn across the floor by the editor in his eagerness to read through the work. They were the first pages of a book that in 1967 would vault Mr. García Márquez onto the world stage. He later authorized an English translation, by Gregory Rabassa. In Spanish or English, readers were tantalized from its opening sentences:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

Melba Hernández, a Confidante of Castro From First Volley

Melba Hernández and Fidel Castro at the 1999 burial of a fellow revolutionary, Jesus Montane, whom she married. Credit Jose Goitia/Associated Press 

 

Ms. Hernández, who became one of the first four members of Mr. Castro’s general staff, and who died at 92 on March 9 in Havana, went on to share many secrets with the man she helped make the Cuban revolution — beginning with its opening volley, an attack on the Moncada army barracks in southeastern Cuba on July 26, 1953.

For her revolutionary services, which included helping to start the Cuban Communist Party, Ms. Hernández was named a national heroine, among many other honors. After the Vietnam War ended on terms most Communists liked, she was her country’s ambassador to the united Vietnam.

Maria Hernández Rodríguez del Rey was born to middle-class parents on July 28, 1921, in the town of Cruces, in west-central Cuba. She earned degrees in law and social sciences from the University of Havana and worked as a customs lawyer for the government after graduating. Like Mr. Castro, she belonged to the Ortodoxo Party, which condemned the Batista government as corrupt and fruitlessly tried to enact peaceful changes.

 

Huber Matos, Comrade of Castro, Then Adversary

Fidel Castro, center, in 1959 with Mr. Matos, right, and Camilo Cienfuegos. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

 

Huber Matos, a top commander in Fidel Castro’s army who broke from the Cuban revolution in 1959 over its tilt toward Communism, endured a harsh imprisonment for 20 years and became a leader of anti-Castro exiles in Florida, died in Miami on Thursday. He was 95. The cause was a heart attack, his family said.

A longtime opponent of the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, Mr. Matos, a former country schoolteacher, was one of a handful of men in the inner circle of Castro’s revolutionary organization, the 26th of July Movement.

In 1958 he traveled to Costa Rica and organized a large and crucial delivery of weapons to Cuban rebels in the Sierra Maestra. A year later he helped capture Havana, entering the city by Mr. Castro’s side, and he was named military commander of Camagüey Province.

But as Mr. Castro moved covertly toward Marxism in his first year in power, Mr. Matos expressed displeasure with the shift and, as he recounted in his autobiography, “How the Night Arrived,” appealed to Mr. Castro to stay true to the goals of the revolution, including re-establishing democratic government.

Increasingly disillusioned, Mr. Matos sent a letter of resignation to Mr. Castro alleging Communist infiltration in the government. In response, in October 1959, Mr. Castro ordered his arrest, a directive carried out by Camilo Cienfuegos, a central figure in the revolutionary movement. (Days later, Mr. Cienfuegos was presumed dead when a plane carrying him to Havana from Camagüey disappeared over the ocean.)

 Some speculate Fidel had Cienfuegos killed.

 

Cuban Exile

United Press International - Orlando Bosch in 1965



Bosch became a lightning rod in the Cuban-exile world. His supporters called him a hero, holding rallies for him and lobbying to name a Miami expressway after him. Richard L. Thornburgh, when he was the United States attorney general under the first President George Bush, called him “an unreformed terrorist.” Mr. Bosch maintained that he had fought a “just war” against Fidel Castro — whom he called a “a monster” — often with support by the American government.

 Orlando Bosch Avila was born on Aug. 18, 1926, in the village of Potrerillo, Cuba, about 150 miles east of Havana. His father was a restaurateur and his mother a teacher. He went to medical school at the University of Havana, where he was president of the student council. He worked on student issues with Mr. Castro, the law school’s delegate to the council, then cooperated with him in fighting the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

When Mr. Bosch arrived in Miami in February 1988, however, the welcome was not warm. He was arrested for violating his parole. In June, the Justice Department ordered him deported. But legal maneuverings and political support, including that of Jeb Bush, then a Florida businessman and later the state’s governor, kept him in detention as an undesirable alien until the first President Bush, Jeb Bush’s father, overruled the deportation order in 1990.In return, Mr. Bosch renounced the use of force, an agreement he later called “a farce.”

Another great Bush act.

“They purchased the chain,” Mr. Bosch said, “but they don’t have the monkey.”

Che's compañero

Javier Galeano/Associated Press - Alberto Granado Jiménez, during an interview in his Havana home with The Associated Press in October 2007.

Alberto Granado Jiménez, the Argentine biochemist who accompanied the young Che Guevara on his formative odyssey across South America, died here on Saturday. He was 88.  Mr. Granado, who settled in Cuba in 1961, died of natural causes, according to Cuban state television. His ashes were to be scattered in Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela, a state newscast said.

In December 1951, Mr. Granado and Che set out from Córdoba on Mr. Granado’s overloaded, beat-up motorbike, La Poderosa II, or the powerful one. Their eight-month journey, both a madcap coming-of-age road trip and a journey of political discovery, made a deep impression on both men and set Che on a course that transformed him into a revolutionary icon. The bike, which Mr. Granado said looked like a “huge prehistoric animal,” had endless mechanical problems and made it only as far as Chile. The companions, however, traveled thousands of miles together, scrounging rides and food, and finally parting in Caracas, Venezuela.

Mr. Granado moved to Cuba at Che’s invitation in 1961 and founded the faculty of medicine at the University of Santiago. He later moved to Havana, where he taught and carried out scientific research. Mr. Granado is survived by his wife, Delia María Duque Duque, three children and five grandchildren. He and Che remained friends, and though he openly disputed Che’s conviction that guerrilla warfare was the path to social reform in Latin America, Mr. Granado helped him scout for potential rebels in Argentina in the 1960s, according to a biography by Jon Lee Anderson, “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life.”

Before Che left Cuba in 1965 to pursue revolutions abroad, he left several books with inscriptions for close friends. They included one about the sugar industry for Mr. Granado. The inscription was prescient. “My dreams shall know no bounds, at least until bullets decide otherwise,” wrote Che, who was captured and killed in Bolivia in 1967. “I’ll be expecting you, sedentary gypsy, when the smell of gunpowder subsides. A hug for all of you. Che.”

Helped shape Cuban policy

R. Richard Rubottom: a diplomat who influenced and helped hone United States policy toward Latin America in the late 1950s, a time of economic and political tumult that culminated in Fidel Castro’s takeover in Cuba. Mr. Rubottom rose from modest roots — his parents ran a boardinghouse in central Texas — to become the “official most responsible for defining United States Cuban policy” in the years immediately surrounding the 1959 Cuban revolution, the historian Thomas G. Paterson wrote in “Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution” (1994).

Mr. Rubottom began grappling with foreign policy issues in Latin America as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs from 1956 to 1960. In 1958 he accompanied Vice President Richard M. Nixon on a widely publicized tour of Latin America that was marred by violent demonstrations against the United States. After protesters in Caracas, Venezuela, shattered windows in the vice president’s car, news reports suggested that Mr. Nixon partly blamed Mr. Rubottom for allowing his motorcade to be put in harm’s way.

For Nixon, it was always somebody else's fault.


As a high-level strategist on American policy toward Cuba in the late 1950s, Mr. Rubottom was portrayed in books and news reports as a strong early supporter of the country’s repressive leader, Fulgencio Batista as he battled the rebellion led by Fidel Castro. But Mr. Rubottom later worried that Mr. Batista’s “brutal retaliatory tactics” were eroding his support and questioned whether the United States should continue to sell tanks to Cuba after it became known that Mr. Batista was using them against his domestic opponents, a violation of American law. Mr. Batista ultimately canceled the tank order.


With the rise of Mr. Castro, Mr. Rubottom represented the State Department in meetings with military and intelligence officials on whether, how and when to try to eliminate him both before and after he seized power in January 1959. Yet when Mr. Castro visited the United States in April 1959 as Cuba’s new leader, Mr. Rubottom was on hand to greet him, and he was deputized to ask Mr. Castro what American aid he would like. Mr. Castro said none.


Some politicians and historians have criticized Mr. Rubottom for not identifying Mr. Castro as a Communist before he took control. But Adolf A. Berle, a former assistant secretary of state, wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1962 that he knew for certain Mr. Rubottom had not known. However, he and his deputy, William Wieland, were convinced that Mr. Castro was “a hopeless megalomaniac,” Mr. Berle wrote, and that the “optimistic image created by the uninformed American press” was wrong.


In 1960, Mr. Rubottom created a controversy by telegraphing Gov. Edmund G. Brown of California with an appeal by the Uruguayan government to halt the planned execution of Caryl Chessman, a convicted robber and rapist who had become a global cause célèbre for opponents of capital punishment. Governor Brown granted Mr. Chessman a 60-day reprieve, although he was ultimately executed. Mr. Rubottom said he had merely been passing on information that related to American foreign policy — Uruguay opposed the death penalty — but his action ignited a debate over federal intervention in state matters and prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to issue a statement saying the execution was entirely a California matter.

Captured Life Under Communism

Mr. Lockwood in Cuba with Fidel Castro, whom he persuaded to sit for a long and highly personal interview in 1965.

Lee Lockwood, an American photojournalist who had rare opportunities to capture political, military and civilian life in Communist countries — documenting the treatment of an American prisoner of war in North Vietnam and persuading Fidel Castro to sit for a long, discursive, smoke-filled and highly personal interview — died on July 31 in Tamarac, Fla. He was 78 and lived in Weston, Fla. The cause was complications of diabetes, his sister, Susan Lewinnek, said.

As his work through the decades made clear, Mr. Lockwood regarded photojournalism as a potent instrument for social change. A freelance photographer, he was associated for many years with the Black Star agency, which furnished his images to newspapers and magazines around the globe. He also wrote several books, including “Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel: An American Journalist’s Inside Look at Today’s Cuba in Text and Picture” (Macmillan, 1967).

Lee Lockwood/Black Star - Lt. Cmdr. Richard A. Stratton of the Navy, a prisoner of war in Hanoi in 1967. “His eyes were empty,” Lee Lockwood wrote.

In 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, Mr. Lockwood was the first outside photographer in more than a decade to be allowed into North Vietnam. (Not long before, while in Havana to research his Castro book, he had prudently obtained a North Vietnamese visa there.)

The fruit of Mr. Lockwood’s 28-day visit, a long, heavily illustrated essay titled “North Vietnam Under Siege,” was published as the cover article of the April 7, 1967, edition of Life magazine.

Though Mr. Lockwood’s trip to North Vietnam was carefully controlled — he was forbidden to photograph military installations and had a government official with him at all times — he managed to traverse 1,000 miles in the month he spent there.

In words and photos, Mr. Lockwood portrayed the life of a country then under heavy bombardment by United States forces: bare, ruined villages; deserted factories; a boy with a missing leg, lost to a bomb. There were also calmer, quieter images of farmers, flower sellers and hemp dyers plying their trades.

His most striking encounter, in Hanoi, was with Lt. Cmdr. Richard A. Stratton, an American Navy pilot who had been captured in January 1967. As Mr. Lockwood and other foreign newsmen listened, a man identifying himself as Commander Stratton read over a loudspeaker a long “confession” attacking United States involvement in the region. Then, from behind a curtain, Commander Stratton appeared, looking, Mr. Lockwood wrote, “like a puppet.”

“His eyes were empty,” Mr. Lockwood wrote. “He stood stiffly at attention while movie lights were turned on and photographers took pictures. His expression never changed.” Accompanying Mr. Lockwood’s account was his photograph of Commander Stratton, clad in prison pajamas, making a deep, supplicating bow on orders from a North Vietnamese officer. The image, which occupied a full page of the Life article, was widely reproduced. Partly in response to Mr. Lockwood’s article, the State Department accused North Vietnam of brainwashing American prisoners to elicit antiwar statements from them. In an interview with The New York Times in 2008, Commander Stratton, who had been released in 1973, suggested that such statements were less the product of brainwashing than of common sense. “You are being tortured and all you have to do to get them to stop is say the same thing that Bobby Kennedy is saying,” Commander Stratton said.

Lee Jonathan Lockwood was born in New York City on May 4, 1932, and took up photography as a boy. He earned a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Boston University in 1954 and later did graduate work in the field at Columbia. In the mid-1950s, he served with the Army, stationed in Munich.

Besides his sister, Ms. Lewinnek, Mr. Lockwood is survived by his wife, the former Joyce Greenfield, whom he married in 1964; a brother, Roger; two children, Andrew Lockwood and Gillian Rubin; and six grandchildren.

His other books include “Conversation With Eldridge Cleaver: Algiers” (McGraw-Hill, 1970) and “Daniel Berrigan: Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes — Conversations After Prison With Lee Lockwood” (Random House, 1972).

Mr. Lockwood’s best-known book was the one born of his marathon interview with Mr. Castro, which unspooled over a full week in Cuba in 1965. The discourse ranged over Marxism, the Cuban missile crisis, American race relations, sex, prostitution and much else.

It was vital, Mr. Lockwood believed, that American readers be given a full portrait of a man known here as a cipher at best, a demon at worst.

“We don’t like Castro, so we close our eyes and hold our ears,” he wrote in the book’s introduction. “Yet if he is really our enemy, as dangerous to us as we are told he is, then we ought to know as much about him as possible.”

August 7, 2010

Lee Lockwood Dies at 78; Captured Life Under Communism

By MARGALIT FOX

Singer who put stamp on Boleros

Gaston De Cardenas/Miami Herald, Via Associated Press



MIAMI BEACH (AP) — Olga Guillot, the celebrated Cuban singer known as the queen of the bolero, died here on Monday. She was 87. The cause was a heart attack, a family spokeswoman said.

Born in Santiago, Cuba, Ms. Guillot was first recognized for her vocal talent at age 13, when she placed second in a singing contest with her sister. At 20, she performed with Edith Piaf. She left Cuba in 1962, two years after the start of the Communist revolution, and settled in Mexico. Over the years, Ms. Guillot had many gold and platinum albums and performed at Carnegie Hall and other concert halls around the world. She also appeared, often as herself, in several movies. .

Vicky Roig, a fellow bolero singer and a close friend, said she had spoken with Ms. Guillot about a week before her death. Ms. Guillot had been preparing to travel to Mexico to perform with the National Symphony Orchestra.

“For many bolero singers, she was the image of who we wanted to be,” Ms. Roig said. “We all wanted to imitate her. She was our reference as an artist.”

Ms. Guillot’s hits included “La Gloria Eres Tu,” “Tu Me Acostumbraste” and the song with which she was most closely identified, “Miénteme.”

In March she had participated in a march and demonstration in Miami, led by the singer Gloria Estefan, in support of the Ladies in White, a group of wives and family members of Cuban political prisoners.In an interview with The Associated Press in 2007, Ms. Guillot said she had experienced only one disappointment in her career: that in her native country, “there is a whole generation that doesn’t know” her and other performers who fled Cuba.

“They don’t know anything about those of us who have represented Cuba in exile, in the world.”

July 16, 2010: Olga Guillot, Singer Who Put Stamp on Boleros, Dies at 87